News.me: “News.me is a small team based out of betaworks in New York City. We build applications that improve the way people find and talk about the news. – We have an iPhone app, an iPad app, and a daily email that deliver the best stories shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook.”

News.me: “News.me for iPhone delivers the must-read news from your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Reading the news has always lent itself to a social experience: from the breakfast table to the water cooler to the classroom. But on the social web we’re no longer just ‘readers’ – we are all publishers, curating and distributing links to our own audience of friends and followers. – Yet when it comes to finding news on Twitter and Facebook, we hear the same complaint over and over again: ‘there’s too much stuff!’ At News.me, we want to help people wade through the chatter to find the news that truly matters. – News.me for iPhone analyzes all the links shared by your friends to find only the most relevant news for you. News.me is smart – it does the hard work of finding the right news so that you don’t have to. Each article is then presented in a beautiful stream that displays the publisher, headline, photo, and most importantly, what your friends are saying about it.”

RWW: “News.me launched its free iPhone app this morning, which introduces Facebook integration, a saved offline reading list that syncs with the iPad app and Instapaper, and new, simple social dynamics of its own. It digests the links shared by Twitter and Facebook contacts, checks Bit.ly for their popularity, and presents a list of the top news stories in a clean, readable environment. … I hate ‘It’s-the-this-of-that’ tech news stories, but I hope this comparison is meaningful: What Instagram is to photos and Path is to personal moments, News.me is to news. It’s a one-thumbed way to connect with people over the news of the day.”

GigaOM: “News.me has an interesting history: It started as a skunkworks project inside the New York Times – an attempt on the part of a couple of NYT developers to come up with a way of filtering Twitter based on a user’s social network. The team formed a partnership with the New York-based incubator and venture firm Betaworks (creator of services such as the Bitly link-shortener and Chartbeat) and then News.me was eventually absorbed into Bitly and the New York Times wound up with shares in the company.”

TC: “A bit unusually, the part of the app that you’ll use first may actually be the least interesting. In some ways, the new app is just a redesign of what News.me was already offering through its iPad and email products – a list of news stories, pulled from your Facebook and Twitter streams, then curated based on signals from Twitter and bit.ly, and presented with the context of the initial tweet or Facebook comment. … Although the company has been focused on the iPhone recently, and even though the iPad app has been less successful than the email digest, it sounds like Levine plans to add the new features to the iPad eventually.”

AT: “The goal isn’t to just be yet another news service – the idea is that you’re more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing (compared to a standard firehose of news coming from every direction), which is why you might want to use a service that analyzes your feeds for shared stories. ‘We’re bringing you the best of your Twitter and Facebook in a streamlined interface, along with a venue for you to converse about news with your friends,’ News.me developer Robert Haining told Ars on Thursday. … The News.me iPhone app also offers a Reading List feature, which is pretty much what you would expect. Like Safari’s Reading List or even Instapaper itself, you can mark stories from your News.me feed to read offline.“

PEJ: “The faltering U.S. economy was the No. 1 story in the American news media in 2011, with coverage increasing substantially from a year earlier when economic unease helped alter the political landscape in the midterm elections, according to The Year in the News 2011, a new report conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. – The year 2011 was also characterized by a jump of more than a third in coverage of international news, by a growing contrast in the content of the three broadcast networks and by a series of dramatic breaking news events that dominated coverage in ways unprecedented in PEJ’s five years of studying news agenda. – The biggest story of the year, however, was the economy. … PEJ’s The Year in the News is derived from an analysis of close to 46,000 stories produced from January 1-December 11, 2011 that were examined as part of the group’s ongoing content analysis of 52 different traditional news outlets from the main five media sectors, its News Coverage Index. The report also includes an analysis of the year in social media, based on the group’s weekly analysis of blogs and Twitter, the New Media Index. – The findings are also available for users to examine themselves in PEJ’s Year in the News Interactive, where users can delve into the data base by story, by broad topic and compare different news sectors and outlets with one another. … Another difference in 2011 was that the focus of economic coverage shifted. The story changed from being about taxes and jobs to being much more a story about government. Almost a third of the economic coverage in the last year (32%) was focused on the budget and national debt (heavily influenced by the debt ceiling crisis). The second biggest storyline was the effect the economy was having on state and local government (12% of the economy coverage). A year ago the two biggest themes were taxes and unemployment. – One new aspect to the economy story in 2011-the Occupy Wall Street Protests which began in September-proved to be the fourth-biggest storyline, at 5% of the overall economic coverage.”

PEJ – The Year of the Mega Story: “The biggest one-week story of the year was the killing May 1 of Osama bin Laden by Navy Seals. That week, the story filled 69% of the newshole, making it the biggest weekly story PEJ has measured since January 2007. The previous biggest story, (also at about 69%,) was the 2008 presidential campaign from August 25-31, 2008, when Democrats nominated Barack Obama at their Denver convention and John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his surprise running mate.”

PEJ – All News By Topic: “Besides looking at just the biggest stories of the year, one advantage of PEJ’s The Year in the News is that it can also categorize all the stories studied during the year by topic to measure the broader agenda-setting influence of the media. What topics got covered and what did not? This probes deeper patterns in news beyond what the biggest breaking news events tended to be. – The jump in coverage of overseas events not directly involving the U.S. (from 11% to 18%) was the biggest change in the year. There was a much smaller increase in attention to international stories that involved the U.S.-10% in 2011 compared with 9% in 2010.”

PEJ – The Year on Blogs and Twitter: “While blogs and Twitter are both called social media and have a similar basic function – the sharing of information and opinion – their news agendas differed markedly in 2011 (something we also saw in 2010). The data examined by PEJ reveal that Twitter users were more consumed by new digital technology and products. The blogosphere more closely followed the traditional press focus on current events and issues. – In effect, while similar percentages of adults in the U.S. blog and use Twitter (14% and 13% respectively), they use the two platforms differently. The conversation on Twitter has a distinct and narrower set of news priorities, at least as measured by the top five subjects each week. Bloggers are forging a hybrid news agenda that shares elements with both Twitter and the mainstream media. … The 2011 data indicate that, first and foremost, people use Twitter to discuss and disseminate news and reviews about the latest high-tech products. When added together, the three related topics-consumer news, technology and business-made up almost half the stories that made the top five list derived from our multiple tracking services in a given week. … Breaking down that conversation from topic to storyline, in 2011 the four most popular stories on Twitter were, in descending order, news about Facebook, Google, Twitter itself and Apple-all giants of the new information ecosystem. … Considerably less prominent on Twitter were the news events and issues that are fodder for newspaper front pages and cable talk shows. … In blogs, the conversation about government and politics, as well as diplomacy and overseas events, combined to account for almost one-third of the stories in the top five list in a given week. In addition, roughly another third (29%) of the dialogue on blogs was devoted to a series of public policy issues that included the economy, the environment, health care, education and others.”

PEJ – The Press and the Public: “In a year defined by a number of major news events, the mainstream media and the U.S. public often agreed on the most important stories. – According to data from the Pew Research Center for the People und the Press, three of five stories that generated the most public attention in a single week were among those that also received the highest level of weekly coverage from the press. … The story that generated the most public interest for the year was the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The week of March 14-20, a full 55% of those surveyed said they were following events there very closely. … If there was a divergence between public interest and the media interest on these major stories, however, it could be found in how long the public was interested in something versus the media. In several cases, high levels of public interest outlasted media coverage as the press moved on to other events.”

PEJ – Top Newsmakers: “Barack Obama was the top newsmaker of the year. He was the primary newsmaker (meaning 50% of the story focused on him) in a total of 3,802 stories or 8% of the stories studied-the same percentage as a year earlier. Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan strongman who was deposed and later killed by rebels, was the second-biggest newsmaker by this measure, the focus of 1% of all stories studied. Indeed, three of the top 20 newsmakers last year were key Mideast figures who were either deposed or killed-Gaddafi, bin Laden (1%) and former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (less than 1%).”

PEJ – The Cable Difference: “With different audience bases, different sibling networks and different styles, the three main cable news channels [MSNBC, Fox, CNN] also had different definitions of what constituted news in 2011. Some of the distinctions between the three main channels, in other words, are in story selection, not only style or tone. – The weakening economy, for instance, was a much bigger story on MSNBC (30% of the airtime studied), a sibling of business channel CNBC, than anywhere else. It received the second-most attention on Fox (21%), which also has a sibling channel focused on financial matters, Fox Business. The economy was a much smaller story on CNN (14%).”

PEJ – Network News Agendas: “Traditionally, the three broadcast networks [ABC, CBS, NBC] have not had marked variations in their selection of news. That appears to be changing. In 2011, one network appears to differentiating itself with a more hard news orientation. – CBS, which publicly has announced that it is trying to define itself with a more hard news approach, devoted almost one-third of the airtime studied on its evening newscasts (30%) to two major stories-the economy and Middle East unrest-over the course of the year. That compares with 24% on the ABC’s World News Tonight and 23% on The NBC Nightly News.”

PEJ – The PBS Difference: “An examination of 2011 coverage also reveals some ways in which the PBS NewsHour differs in its agenda from the rest of the media, particularly in what viewers can find elsewhere on television. – The most striking difference is that the NewsHour offered more than one-third more coverage of international events over the last year than the media overall, including all other forms of television news (cable, morning and network evening). In total, 39% of the time on the NewsHour was devoted to foreign events and U.S. foreign policy, compared with 28% in the media sample generally, 23% on cable news, 24% on the network morning news shows and 24% on the network evening broadcasts.”

PEJ – A Year in the News Interactive 2011: “Follow the steps below to select among media sectors and news coverage categories. The data are based on nearly 46,000 stories analyzed in PEJ’s News Coverage Index for the year: 1. Choose which sectors interest you… 2. Choose subjects that interest you from one of these four categories…”

Pew: “Contrary to much of the conventional understanding of how people learn about their communities, Americans turn to a wide range of platforms to get local news and information, and where they turn varies considerably depending on the subject matter and their age… Most Americans, including more tech-savvy adults under age 40, also use a blend of both new and traditional sources to get their information. Overall, the picture revealed by the data is that of a richer and more nuanced ecosystem of community news and information than researchers have previously identified.”

Pew: “The local news and information environment is changing in ways that most people believe makes it easier for them to get the specific information they want about their communities. More than half of Americans (55%) say it is easier today to get the local information they want than it was five years ago. … Top Popularity of Different Local Topics: Weather (89%), Breaking News (80%), Politics/Campaigns/Elections (67%), Crime, Arts/Cultural events, Local Business, Schools/Education, Community/Neighborhood events, Restaurants/Clubs/Bars, Traffic/Transportation, Taxes/Tax issues, Housing/Real estate, Government activities, Job openings, Social services, Zoning/Building/Development”

Pew: “The survey indicated that newspapers play a far more complex role in the civic life of communities than many Americans believe. … Younger adults, age 18-29, were especially unconcerned. Fully 75% say their ability to get local information would not be affected in a major way by the absence of their local paper. … [W]hen asked about specific local topics and which sources they rely on for that information, it turns out that many adults are quite reliant on newspapers and their websites.”

Pew: “Local TV (which for the purposes of this survey includes both televised broadcasts and local television websites) is the most popular source for the two topics that almost everyone is interested in – weather and breaking news.”

Pew: “The internet has already surpassed newspapers as a source Americans turn to for national and international news. The findings from this survey now show its emerging role as a source for local news and information as well. … Among the 79% of Americans who are online, the internet is an even more significant source for local news and information. Looking just at this group, the internet is the first or second most important source for 15 of the 16 local topics examined.”

Pew: “Two other factors seem to drive people to the internet when it comes to getting information about local subjects: mobile connections via smartphones or tablet computers and participation in the digital environment by sharing or creating local material themselves.”

Pew: “In addition to the three biggest media platforms – newspapers, television and the internet – the local news and information ecosystem involves a complex mix of other sources as well. And for several local topics, citizen-based systems such as word of mouth (which does not include online social networking), print newsletters and bulletins, and the local government itself make appearances as sources that some residents rely upon.”

Twitter: “Five years ago, Twitter came to life when @jack sent the first Tweet to his seven followers. Now, 100 million active users around the globe turn to Twitter to share their thoughts and find out what’s happening in the world right now. – More than half of them log in to Twitter each day to follow their interests. For many, getting the most out of Twitter isn’t only about tweeting: 40 percent of our active users simply sign in to listen to what’s happening in their world. – Twitter’s global reach gives a voice to people around the world and as far away as the International Space Station. After launching Hindi, Filipino, Malay and Simplified and Traditional Chinese in the coming weeks, Twitter will support 17 different languages.”

RWW: “If this news sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the five-year-old microblogging service reached 100 million user accounts awhile ago. These new numbers refer to active users, which CEO Dick Costolo defines as people that sign into Twitter and use the site at least once a month. … In April, Twitter publicly confirmed that it had surpassed 200 million user accounts, a number that has presumably grown since then. This means that at least 50% of Twitter accounts are sitting dormant, according to the company’s own numbers. … The service is being used to publish an average of 230 million tweets per day, which works out to more than a billion tweets every week.”

TNW: “55% of Twitter’s active users are active on mobile, which is an increase of 40% quarter over quarter. Twitter is also getting 400 million unique visitors a month total, this points to a huge number of users that visit Twitter just for information without participating. … Twitter has experienced massive growth this year, bolstered by popular public events like the Womens World cup as well as unrest like the London Riots and disasters like the earthquakes and Tsunami in Japan.”

VB: “Microblogging social network Twitter is in the process of closing a new $400 million funding round, reports CNN Money. – The new funding is the second of two $400 million rounds that puts the startup’s valuation at an estimated $8 billion.”